Today is believed to be iPhone-Verizon day (not a ™, nor a national holiday) and the excitement has already had one huge effect: While Verizon's share price has zoomed both up and down, Apple's has soared over 10 points since Friday's first rumors. That means the company's market cap, recently heralded as hitting $300 billion, is already far north of $310 billion. Economics in action. On with the news:

1. Intel and Nvidia have signed a six-year, $1.5 billion cross-licensing deal. The two have been fighting over the CPU/GPU space for some time, but have now kissed and made up and each gets access to select parts of the other's tech. So there's a huge tech benefit we'll see soon: Low, and high-power chips packed with impressive processing and graphics power, eating less electrical energy, meaning better gadgets.

2. Rumors are that the highly touted "The Daily," the first new-tech newspaper for the tablet era, will be debuting on January 19th. It's an iPad-only affair, which is what makes it different, and now the biggest rumor is that none other than Steve Jobs—reportedly hugely excited by the paper—will be joining old-school newsprint dinosaur Rupert Murdoch at its unveiling in San Francisco. Watch this space, folks!

3. Motorola's Xoom tablet is one of the better challengers to the iPad, but it's emerged that Moto has tried to out-Apple Apple in one respect: The sensor bedecked Xoom also has a digital barometer—something even Apple's tech team hasn't tackled. Expect all sorts of weird and wonderful weather prediction apps (to make Oregon Scientific nervous) and, just possibly, clever crowd-sourced tornado warnings.

4. Amazon's Kindle e-reader may be the stuff of Amazon PR heaven but we think in the long term the tech is destined for niche-hood. Now it's looking like Amazon thinks so too, as it pours effort into its apps rather than e-ink: The Kindle App just hit the new Mac App Store, and is already soaring up the Free Apps best-seller list, and the iOS app just got big performance tweaks. It's all about selling the ecosystem.

5. Google's Goggles image-recognition smartphone app has always been a taste of the future, albeit wrappered in Google's hateful UI, but it's just gotten a power-boost that makes it even more amazing: The Android and iOS apps can now read print adverts (and do searches to reveal relevant data for you) and they'll even identify a sudoku puzzle and give you hints on how to complete it. Is that cheating? Who cares when it's so astonishing.

To read more news on this, and similar stuff, keep up with my updates by following me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.